Charles was now seventy-three and his heart was failing. On the night before he died, he woke Emma, saying: “I have got the pain, and I shall feel better, or bear it better, if you are awake.” After another attack, he lost consciousness. When he awoke, Emma was with him, but she told Etty later that she was “not sure in how much suffering he was, as she thinks he felt it was his death pain and that he was resolved to bear it.” He asked her to “Tell all my children to remember how good they have always been to me.” He told her: “I am not the least afraid of death.” After another acute attack, he said: “I was so sorry for you, but I could not help you.” Emma told Etty later that she “hardly could say anything to him, she felt it so awful; only press his hand.” She “felt as if she might break down utterly, but she externally kept her self-control completely.” Charles was in great pain and Emma told Etty: “He was longing to die.”
Etty and Francis arrived at the house during the morning. Charles was now suffering waves of nausea and fits of retching. He pleaded again and again, “If I could but die.” Etty “gave him his salts or rubbed him, and once gave him a little pure whisky by his own desire. His hands were deathly cold and clammy, and Francis could not feel his pulse at all.” They sat with him through the early afternoon. As Etty remembered, “He kept lifting his hands to hold his rope, and then they dropped off with a feeble quivering motion, and many times he called out ‘Oh God,’ ‘Oh Lord God.’ But only as exclamations of distress I think.” Etty kept looking at the clock and felt that the hands never moved.
At about twenty-five minutes past three, Charles said he felt faint. They called for Emma and she came at once to find him grey and cold. He was soon unconscious and “there was the heavy stertorous breathing which precedes death. It was all over before four o’clock.”
The next morning, Etty wrote to George: “Mother is very calm, but she has cried a little. You will come at once.” She later wrote: “My mother was wonderfully calm from the very first, and perfectly natural. She came down to the drawing room to tea, and let herself be amused at some little thing, and smiled, almost laughed for a moment, as she would on any other day. To us, who knew how she had lived in his life, how she had shared almost every moment as it passed, her calmness and self-possession seemed wonderful then and are wonderful now to look back upon. She lived through her desolation alone, and she wished not to be thought about or considered, but to be left to rebuild her life as best she could and to think over her precious past.”
Anne Thackeray Ritchie wrote to Etty when she heard. “No one can have any words—only hearts very full of love and reverence, and sympathy, that must flow from every home to yours . . . When I think of Mr. Darwin, so great, so gentle, so humorous, so beyond all little things and by his kind genius touching humble things and making them great, I feel that he is not gone, and will never die while there are men to look to him . . . Here is one great man to love indeed without fear, and to teach our children to look to and to live towards.”
One evening a few weeks later, after the burial in Westminster Abbey, which Emma did not attend, she was wheeled in her bath chair to the Sand-walk to see the bluebells. She wrote to Etty that “it was all so pretty and bright, it gave me the saddest mixture of feelings, and I felt a sort of self-reproach that I could in a measure enjoy it.” She had been reading over Charles’s old letters. “I have not many, we were so seldom apart, and never I think for the last fifteen or twenty years.” She called her small collection her “precious packet” and took it with her wherever she went. Among the letters were the ones he had written to her before their marriage when he was arranging Macaw Cottage and she was spending her last weeks with her parents at Maer; his letters from Shrewsbury when he was there with Willy in the first months of Annie’s life; his daily accounts of the young children at Down when Emma was at Maer, and his letters from Malvern during the last week before Annie’s death.
As she had done for Annie, Emma found other people’s words to express her feelings. She kept a small notebook, her “book of extracts,” into which she copied verses that she cared for. One poem she liked to read was Tennyson’s In Memoriam. The poem was at once fraught and lyrical in its exploration of how faith is weakened by grief and doubt, and its reaching for consolation in hopes which lie beyond reason. Emma chose three verses.
I know that this was Life, the track
Whereon with equal feet we fared;
And then, as now, the day prepared
The daily burden for the back.
But this it was that made me move
As light as carrier-birds in air;
I loved the weight I had to bear,
Because it needed help of Love:
Nor could I weary, heart or limb,
When mighty Love would cleave in twain
The lading of a single pain,
And part it, giving half to him.
When Emma copied in the third verse with its words about the parting of “a single pain,” she can only have been thinking of how she had shared with Charles their grief for Annie.
Emma took a house in Cambridge to be near George, Francis and Horace, who were all working there and starting families. Etty wrote that while her mother was in Cambridge, “Down and the past was always in the back of her mind, though she was happy in the present. She rejoiced in all old associations, even caring for the ‘dear old azaleas’ brought from Down, saying, ‘I know their faces so well.’ ” Emma came back to Down every year in April or May, always wanting to be there “before the trees have become dark and summerlike.” One year, she wrote to Etty: “It was a dismal black day on my arrival, but I was glad to wander about alone before the others came.”
April, when both Annie and Charles had died, mixed “memory and desire” as T. S. Eliot was to write in The Waste Land thirty-five years later. Emma wrote to Etty in 1887 about Charles’s death, “I do not find that the day of the month makes the anniversary with me, but the look out of doors, the flowers, and the sort of weather.” In 1893, she was reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam again.
Is it, then, regret for buried time
That keenlier in sweet April wakes,
And meets the year, and gives and takes
The colours of the crescent prime?
Not all: the songs, the stirring air,
The life re-orient out of dust,
Cry thro’ the sense to hearten trust
In that which made the world so fair.
Emma copied the next two verses into her book of extracts.Not all regret: the face will shine
Upon me, while I muse alone;
And that dear voice I once have known,
Still speak to me of me and mine:
Yet less of sorrow lives in me
For days of happy commune dead;
Less yearning for the friendship fled,
Than some strong bond which is to be.
Here in the last line were the words for the hope which meant everything to her.
In her last years, Emma went often to places in the neighbourhood where she had been with Charles and the children. She saw the gnarled beeches in a wood near Orchis Bank where the children used to climb, and went often to the terrace in the valley below the Sand-walk copse. She had a special feeling about the terrace with its undergrowth of sloes, traveller’s joy, little yellow rock-roses, ladies’ fingers and harebells. When she sat there, she remembered how Charles would pace to and fro, and she would sit on the dry chalky bank waiting for him.
George brought his American wife Maud and their young children from Cambridge every summer. Gwen later remembered that when they came each year, “As soon as the door was opened, we smelt again the unmistakable cool, empty, country smell of the house, and we rushed all over the big, under-furnished rooms in an ecstasy of joy.” After their breakfast in the nursery, the children would pay a round of calls on the grown-ups who were having breakfast in bed. They played on their grandmother’s bed “with little tin pots and pans, called Pot tikins and
Pannikins, and then she gave us bits of liquorice out of her work-basket, cut up with her work-scissors.” In June 1890, when Gwen was four, Emma wrote: “George took Gwenny a walk by Cudham Lodge to the Salt-Box and then along that ridge below. I saw her coming home perfectly fresh and laden with flowers and one strawberry. George said she had been in an ecstasy the whole way, and he looked full of enjoyment himself.”
My grandmother Margaret, Gwen’s younger sister, was a lively child. Once when the elderly Miss Thorley visited the family in Cambridge, Margaret was called into the garden to meet her. Miss Thorley threw up her arms in amazement when she came, and exclaimed how like Annie she was. One July day at Down when Margaret was five, George wrote to Maud in Cambridge: “Yesterday was a ‘scorcher’ as you say, really too much to do anything. I pottered round a little with the children in the morning and late in the afternoon took all three to Orchis Bank and Hangrove which they enjoyed immensely. We came back through Sand-walk and Henrietta and I (for we met her there) made bryony wreaths for them all . . . Mother seems below par and didn’t come downstairs, although she sat in her room and looked at the children playing on the lawn. The children seem as happy as the day is long, and have all gone off to the Sand-walk now. I have promised them a bonfire one day.” As Emma sat at her bedroom window watching her grandchildren play on the lawn below, she may have been thinking of her own children fifty years earlier. And she may have seen Annie for a moment, as Miss Thorley did.
In 1896, Emma was eighty-eight, and through the summer months all her children and grandchildren came to Down to be with her. The furniture around the piano was cleared again and she played the “galloping tune” for the young ones with her arthritic fingers. She went out often with the children, and was taken in her bath chair to some of the family’s favourite places, which she had not visited for some years. One day in September, John the manservant wheeled her in her chair along the Cudham Lane. She wrote to Etty: “It looked ever so much deeper, with high hedges and trees grown. I came back over the big field and through the Smiths’ yard. I felt the sharp wind over the bare field quite like an old friend.”
Emma died early in the morning of the first Friday in October. She had been preparing to leave for Cambridge that day, and her death was “quick, quiet and unexpected.” The funeral took place the following Wednesday. The family, neighbours and close friends came, and blinds were drawn in the village.
Forty-five years before, Emma had gathered her keepsakes of Annie and put them away for herself. When Etty found Annie’s writing case after her mother’s death, and saw her sister’s things for the first time since their childhood, recollections of Annie came back to her with “strange vividness.” The words Charles used in his memorial of Annie to catch his memories of her work in the same way. “She held herself upright, and often threw her head a little backwards, as if she defied the world in her joyousness.”
NOTES
The book is based on Darwin family papers and other items; the manuscripts in the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library; English Heritage’s Darwin Collection at Down House; the Wedgwood/Mosley Collection in Keele University Library; the memoirs and letters published after Charles and Emma Darwin died; administrative records of the time including the registers of births and deaths and national census returns; local directories, guides and newspapers; the books and periodicals that the Darwins are known to have read; others which reflected the thinking of the time, and the wealth of recent Darwin scholarship.
The notes give the sources of all important quotations, and those for other points of interest which may not be easy to find in obvious places. I have given references for domestic details only where the points may be of particular interest for some reason.
A number of recent books and articles that I found particularly helpful are noted for further reading. The full story of Charles’s life has been told in Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin (London, 1991). The first part up to 1856 is also covered in Janet Browne’s Charles Darwin: Voyaging (London, 1995). Darwin on Evolution: The Development of the Theory of Natural Selection, edited by Thomas Glick and David Kohn (Indi anapolis, 1996), provides an excellent introduction to his writings, with full explanations of the notebooks of 1836-44 and other important texts that were not published in his lifetime.
I have normalised the spelling and punctuation of some quotations where the forms of the original would distract a general reader. In some other passages I have kept the original spellings and punctuation because they are part of the character of the text.
Abbreviations
Page Chapter One: Macaw Cottage
3 “This is the question.”—CCD, 2.444.
5 He found a house—R. B. Freeman, Darwin and Gower Street, An Exhibition in the Flaxman Gallery of the Library, University College London (London, 1982).
6 The imposing new buildings—Ian Jenkins, “ ‘Athens Rising Near the Pole’: London, Athens and the Idea of Freedom,” in London: World City 1800-1840, ed. Celina Fox (London, 1992), pp. 143-54.
7 “the largest liberality of opinion”—North London or University College Hospital. Anniversary Dinner in Aid of the Funds . . . April 12, 1864. Charles Dickens Esq. in the Chair (London, 1864), pp. 4-5.
7 “Remnants of carpets”—Gordon Chancellor, “Charles Darwin’s St Helena Model Notebook,” Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural History), Historical Series, vol. 18, no. 2, (1990), pp. 218-19.
7 “If you pluck a branch”—John Hogg, London as It is (London, 1837), pp. 193-4.
9 a strange “wailing whistle”—Alan Jackson, London’s Termini (London, 1985), p. 32.
9 The surgeon, Robert Liston—W. R. Merrington, University College Hospital and its Medical School: A History (London, 1976), pp. 26-35.
10 The minister, James Tagart—H. S. Perris, A Sketch of the History of the Little Portland Street Chapel, London (London, 1900), pp. 8-9. Dr Williams’s Library has a copy of the booklet. Charles Dickens was another member of the congregation.
11 “the endurance of pain”—John Conquest, Letters to a Mother, on the Management of Herself and her Children in Health and Disease (London, 1852), p. 50.
11 “no sentiment is more pregnant”—John Conquest, Letters to a Mother, p. 39.
11 “In the case of a woman”—James Blundell, The Principles and Practice of Obstetric Medicine (London, 1840), Lecture by James Mackintosh at the School of Medicine, Argyle Square, Edinburgh, pp. 103-4.
12 There were four signs—Thomas Bull, Hints to Mothers for the Management of Health during the Period of Pregnancy (London, 1837), Chapter 2, “Of the mode by which pregnancy may be determined.”
13 He became ill—Ralph Colp, To be an Invalid: The Illness of Charles Darwin (Chicago, 1977).
14 “Mrs Darwin is the youngest daughter”—Maria Edgeworth, Letters from England 1813-1844, ed. Christina Colvin (Oxford, 1971), p. 571.
15 “It may be called a fixed law of Nature”—Thomas Bull, The Maternal Management of Children in Health and Disease (London, 1848), p. 13.
16 “In all inflammatory ailments”—“Receipts and Memoranda” book in the English Heritage Darwin Collection at Down House, printed in Ralph Colp, To be an Invalid, Appendix A, pp. 147-67.
17 “They have freedom in their actions”—CFL (1915), 1.59.
Chapter Two: Pterodactyl Pie
20 “Annie born”—CCD, 2.434.
21 Paley argued that if you found a watch—William Paley, Natural Theology, Chapter 1, in The Works of William Paley, D. D. (Edinburgh, 1837), pp. 435-7.
21 “In studying the conformation of fishes”—Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London, 1861), p. 106.
22 “Their name was legion”—D. Landsborough, A Popular History of British Zoophytes or Corallines (London, 1852), p. 55.
22 “the appointment of death”—William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology (London, 1836), p. 133. Chapter 13, in which the passage appears, is entitle
d “Aggregate of animal enjoyment increased, and that of pain diminished, by the existence of carnivorous races.”
23 man “is placed upon this earth”—William Swainson, Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural History (London, 1834), p. 112.
23 “Nine hundred species of intestinal worms”—Robert Grant, An Essay on the Study of the Animal Kingdom . . . Being an Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London on the 23rd of October 1828 (London, 1828), p. 8.
24 “Can you conceive anything”—Benjamin Disraeli, Vivian Grey (London, 1826-27), pp. 315-16, quoted by J. M. I. Klaver, Geology and Religious Sentiment: The Effect of Geological Discoveries on English Society and Literature between 1829 and 1859 (Leiden, 1997).
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